Pulp fiction
Many of the books I read are second-hand, often giveaways. I like this because it saves money, and I also give away most of the books in turn (saving shelf-space!). It's also good because you get to read books you wouldn't typically read otherwise. I like science fiction, so I try to get SF books when I can. And this tends to be of the pulp science fiction type.

What's interesting about pulp SF is that the quality varies immensly. I've read some truly excellent books, for example Childhood's end by Arthur C Clarke. I've also two books of what must surely be the worst science fiction ever written in swedish (in fact, it's so bad it becomes good). A book I've had for a long time without reading is Phoenix by Richard Cowper written in 1967:



I actually enjoyed this book. The plot is basically "a man enters suspended animation to sleep for three years, society crumbles, and man wakes up again 1500 years later in a middle age-like society". A problem with much science fiction is that there are too many references back to the day the book was written. Cowper seems to try to carefully avoid this, but you can still easily recognise some of the 1960s in the book - the eve of destruction, atomic-power-everywhere etc. I've read other books when this tendency is much worse and much more explicit though.

Another fun thing is the "AND DO NOT MISS!" section on the back cover:



Yes, there's Matrix by Douglas R. Mason, subtitled "Their lives were controlled by the mother-computer-complex". Now where have I seen that again?